A: Oh, not too bad I guess. A little bummed that the weekend is over. I am officially that person who wishes for the next weekend on Sunday night. That really, exceedingly old person.

Q: But it’s only 9:15… isn’t the evening still a bit young? Shouldn’t you at least wait for one weekend to end before pining for the next?

A: Well, you see, I go to bed at 10:00 p.m.

Q: Are you shitting me?

A: Um. No. I started going to bed at 10 last November so I could get up early and work on writing. I stopped getting up so early at some point, but I still go to bed at 10.

Q: Okay. So how was your weekend, you old crone?

A: It was good! Picked up my first CSA farmshare of the season. Cleaned the apartment. Read a book. Cooked up a frickin’ storm. Worked on a little homework. Oh, and I dyed my hair all by myself! And then Softscrubbed the bathroom sink, all by myself.

Q: Well aren’t you a busy little beaver. Do you feel a little less senile now that your gray roots are gone?

I’m rewatching Mad Men, just cuz, and lucky for me, January Jones decides to crash her car in a parking lot and her face is all over the online gossip rags. The ones I’m far too busy to read, of course.

In May, I had a lovely little thing called FINALS WEEK, where I had papers and projects and presentations due in every class. I retreated into FINALS WEEK SURVIVAL MODE, characterized by a significant shift in priorities.

1. Some things that are usually considered Required Activities become Earned Privileges, to be done only if you have completed whatever schoolwork is due the next day.

See: take-out food when there’s no time to cook, food-on-the-go when there’s no time to pack lunch, coffee when there’s no time to wake up properly

3. Liberal application of pharmaceuticals and stimulants

See: Excedrin and caffeine

4. Foul mood

See: All of the above

So that was last semester. I survived, had a week off, and then, shockingly, found that Summer Semester is really like a long series of Finals Weeks! So I have reading. And papers. And presentations. And 6 hours of class a week. (and a job… and an internship… and a stress problem). Still popping Excedrins daily, having Lance drop me off at Starbucks when he leaves for work at 6:15 every other week or so, and feeling like crap.

That’s all backdrop though, for the torture that is my class.

I walked into my first day of class without a syllabus and without knowing what class I’d signed up for. I knew who my professors would be. I knew it was a joint Library Science and Children’s Lit class. I knew it would probably kick my ass a little. I knew it was called “Special Topics.”

I quickly found out that my class is really designed to make me and my classmates interrogate every assumption we’ve ever made, consciously or unconsciously, about books, publishing, authors, book awards, journals, adults, children, and basically everything about our careers we thought would be kind of exciting and important.

Adults who read childrens’ books are pedophiles. Publishers are money-grubbing exploiters. Parents are ruthless dictators of their children. Authors are arrogant, self-aggrandizing liars.

It’s all true, though, from an academic, highly critical standpoint. All of those things are true. However, it’s not particularly practical to run around believing all that stuff because then you’d have to basically take children’s lit and librarianship and parenthood and children and just walk away.

And that’s what’s so frustrating about this course – there is no right answer. In class, you figure out what your professor wants, what direction is the “right” direction to address the information at hand, and you imitate or at least try to see it their way. Not in this class. Not only do we have two professors from two different disciplines sitting in front of us, pushing and pulling us from either perspective, we can’t even please one of them because they’re admittedly complicit in committing all these “crimes” against childhood.

They’re wrong too. Everyone and everything and every book is problematic, troublesome, and wrong.

So I’m under-slept, over-junkfooded, over-caffeinated, busy-busy-busy, and then throw impossible philosophical questions at me for six hours a week?

When life and all of its infinite questions, conundrums, challenges, confusions and general uncertainties start to get me down, my subconscious likes to avoid thinking about those important life challenges and decisions I should be thinking about and focus on some kind of quantifiable worry instead.

Like my bank account!

I’m having some problems spending and saving money.

Problem #1: I never feel like I have enough

We live in the 8th Most Expensive City in America. Our rent for a 400 square foot one bedroom apartment is about three times what our friends back home in Michigan pay on their new mortgages. For Lance to drive to work and back, we pay 260 dollars for car insurance, 220 dollars in gas, and 80 dollars in tolls. Every month.

But we are getting by. Our bills are getting paid. We have cable, internet, and cell phones. We find 50 to 150 dollars in personal spending money in the budget every month or so. We have enough savings for most emergencies, and some investments.

However, I feel like we are on the brink of financial ruin every day.

We are living comfortably, but our savings is not enough to absorb substantial unexpected expenses. Like when the vet quotes you 600 dollars to get the cat spayed. Or if the car needs a major repair. Or if one of us loses our job.

We have an almost unbelievable amount of student loans.

Any spending we do is still extravagant in my mind. Any savings we do is insubstantial.

~

Problem #2: Lance’s car is 10 years old, has over 200,000 miles on it, and its body cannot sustain another traffic accident.

Lance tells me the thing will run forever.

I just can’t believe it. The car is not worth sinking too much money into at this point, and if we get into another car accident, even if we get rear-ended at a red light, the car will most likely be totaled.

We came to Boston with a crappy car because we knew we had another crappy car sitting at home in my parent’s driveway in Michigan, waiting for us when we needed it. However, a month ago my mother informed me that they took the car in for a weird noise and came home with a $2,700 estimate for repairs.

Right now, we’d have to liquidate investments to buy a cheap used car (under 5k, if those cars even exist), and with Lance working full time out of the city, we wouldn’t have much time to be choosy.

We are both unwilling to take on a car payment, but if anything happens at the wrong time, we might not have a choice.

This makes me panic on a near-daily basis, and makes me pick fights with Lance because he doesn’t seem to be as panicked as I am.

~

Problem #3: I spend too much money on things that give me little return on the investment

Lance and I run our budget from a joint checking account (any jaws dropping? that seems to be the common reaction when I mention this to anyone). Every paycheck, we subtract out whatever checks will need to go through on that pay period – groceries, electric, rent, internet, et cetera – and then we split what’s left between our savings, our Scottrade account, and our personal checking.

On a good month, we each get 150 dollars. On a bad month, we get 50, or nothing.

This is working fine. Sometimes I feel like 150 is too much, especially given all my anxieties about savings, but the 150 is not just Starbucks money. We buy our own clothing, our own non-grocery food, haircuts, shoes, plane tickets or gas money for trips home, sometimes textbooks for me, gifts for family and friends, home furnishings, and anything else that doesn’t fall under the strict guideline of We Must Pay For This Or Default On Our Bill, really.

But again, 150 is really fine. Except that we’ve just moved to a new climate, a new environment, started new jobs and moved to our own place. Our needs for things like dishes and wall-decorations and new sheets is higher than the average person (okay, MY needs for all these things, not Lance’s), our need for professional clothing for all weather, new sneakers for walking 4 miles a day to work and back.

Some months I resist the urge to buy much of anything. My money piles up. This makes me happy. I spend some money on something I need, the floodgates open: I go out for drinks with friends, I make poor decisions and buy clothes that don’t fit me, I start splurging on daily coffee, buying lunch at school, and ordering things online that fancy me. And then I’m back down to a low bank account, and realize that I don’t have enough money for a haircut and I haven’t had one since December, realize I don’t have enough money to go home and visit my family on my week off, realize that I have now got myself hooked on morning caffeine and feel miserable unless I drop 4 dollars on a damn iced mocha.

My hair needs cut. My jeans don’t fit. I said no to drinks with friends last night but spent over 5 dollars this morning at Starbucks. I’m wearing sneakers purchased in 2005. If my laptop bites it (it is almost three years old now), I will be computer-less because it would take me over a year of saving 100% of my spending money to buy a new one.

These are not all necessary things. In fact, we’ve done without for almost a year and emerged no worse for the wear. And this list was longer when we first moved.

But there’s something unsettling about not knowing when and if I will have these things. If coming up with an extra 50 bucks at the end of the month is still something worth celebrating, then you’re not working toward a “Finish Line,” at which point you will magically have money and irons and clothes hangers fall from the sky and into your hands.

Problem #5: Lance and I are not married

This is not a direct problem for our relationship or our finances at this time. And I’m sure many of the problems we have communicating about money would continue on if we were to get hitched.

However, for me, it just makes things that much more confusing.

Our money goes to the same place. Lance brings home a lot more money than I do. So when he decides to take more time out of his schedule and teach lessons after school and he keeps that money for his own spending, I get that.

But when Lance gets his hair cut, it costs 15 dollars. When I get my hair cut (and colored because I have enough gray hairs to make most 25-year-old women cry), my bill is at least 100. Or gifts – he has one brother and one mom. I have one mom, one dad, and three sisters. They all have birthdays and Christmas. He gets more spending money, I have more “personal expenses.”

This is fine, as well, but when it comes down to those things listed in Problem #4, I’m the one who can’t stand living without a sharp knife or a TV stand or a GPS, the one who bites the bullet and sacrifices her own spending money.

And what happens if something happens?

I’m just not enough of a modern woman to be truly comfortable with this financial division.

Although I’m aware that this problem could easily be renamed “My Boyfriend/Financial Partner Is Not The Same Person/Mind I Am And That Freaks Me Out”